Weekend Student Hackathon Hosted by NJIT

WHAT: More than 50 NJIT students will compete at NJIT in a student Hackathon. See dozens of empty pizza boxes and soda cartons strewn throughout the Campus Center Ballroom as teams feverishly compete to build next-generation applications using SciVerse, a new search and discovery platform. SciVerse, a product of science and technology publisher Elsevier (http://developer.sciverse.com), leads the trend in science, technology and medical publishing by using open standards for tomorrow's apps-based web. Access to the program was donated by Elsevier.

ATTENTION EDITORS: Winners will be announced at the close of the competition Sunday.

WHERE: NJIT Campus Center Ballroom (second floor)

BACKGROUND: Hackathons, long a staple of information technology subcultures, have gone mainstream in recent years as they have evolved from network security events to collaborative (and competitive) events where developers build working applications from common data sources over a short time period. Elsevier sponsored a similar hackathon last year in the United Kingdom as part of “Science Hack” day. This is the nation’s first hackathon sponsored by Elsevier and at a university. Sponsors include the NJIT Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery and NJIT College of Computing Sciences (CCS).

WHY: “The Elsevier hackathon is the kind of challenging practical real-world collaborative programming experience we like to provide to students to augment the concepts that we teach in the classroom,” said CCS Dean Narain Gehani.

One of the nation's leading public technological universities, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is a top-tier research university that prepares students to become leaders in the technology-dependent economy of the 21st century. NJIT's multidisciplinary curriculum and computing-intensive approach to education provide technological proficiency, business acumen and leadership skills. With an enrollment of more than 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students, NJIT offers small-campus intimacy with the resources of a major public research university. NJIT is a global leader in such fields as solar research, nanotechnology, resilient design, tissue engineering, and cyber-security, in addition to others. NJIT ranks 5th among U.S. polytechnic universities in research expenditures, topping $110 million, and is among the top 1 percent of public colleges and universities in return on educational investment, according to PayScale.com.